Uncommon Ground

Tag Archive: Graduate education

Honoring Ruth Millikan

Ruth Millikan is Emeritus Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UConn. Quoting from her web page, Ruth’s “research interests span many topics in the philosophy of biology, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and ontology.” She is a highly respected and influential philosopher. From her Wikipedia page:

She was awarded the Jean Nicod Prize and gave the Jean Nicod Lectures in Paris in 2002.[3] She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2014 [4] and received, in 2017, both the Nicholas Rescher Prize for Systematic Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh[5] and the Rolf Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy.[6]

On April 30th I had the great honor of presenting a few remarks at an event held to celebrate Ruth’s contributions and to inaugurate the Ruth Garrett Millikan Endowment to support graduate students. Daniel Dennett was the featured speaker, and he highlighted Ruth’s contributions, focusing especially on one of her early books – Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories – and her most recent one – Beyond Concepts. If you want to understand why her work is so important, you’ll need to read those books yourself. Her Wikipedia page provides only a very brief summary.

My comments focused on why graduate education, particularly PhD education, and financial support for graduate education is vital. On the off chance you’re interested in reading what I had to say, the full text of my remarks follows.

(more…)

Made it to Brisbane

It’s among the longest stretch of (planned) travel that I’ve done.1 I

  • left Hartford at 11:45am EDT on Thursday, April 19
  • arrived in Cinncinnati at 1:53pm,
  • left Cinncinnati at 2:45pm,
  • arrived in Los Angeles at 4:45pm PDT,
  • left Los Angeles at 10:30, and
  • arrived in Brisbane at 5:30am Australian Eastern time on Saturday, April 21.

There’s a 14 hour time difference between Brisbane and Hartford. That makes the total travel time 27 hours, 45 minutes gate to gate. I arrived at my hotel about 2 1/2 hours ago. Remarkably, they had a room they could give me, even though the official check in time isn’t until 2:00pm. It’s a very comfortable room in what appears to be a very nice part of the city. I don’t have any meetings until tomorrow. Once I’ve finished up a couple of things I want to do, I’m going to put on some comfortable shoes and go for a walk around town with my camera. First stop, the City Botanic Gardens. I’ll miss the farmer’s market, which is held tomorrow, and I’m not sure what I’ll visit after the botanic gardens, but I’m going to keep going all day. If I can go to bed at something resembling a normal time, there’s a good chance I’ll escape the worst effects of jet lag tomorrow.

The photo is the view from my hotel room.

  1. A few years ago it took me 3 1/2 days to get home from Capetown. I was stranded in Amsterdam for 2 nights. Yes I mean stranded. The first night I was stuck in the airport. The second night I was at an airport hotel, but I didn’t get there until 3 in the afternoon – too late to go into the city and enjoy anything.